A Preview Of My Scheduled Video Content This Month

Cinemibus: Episode 1, I Love The Cabin In The Woods from Cinemibus on Vimeo.

I am in the process of migrating my more intensive webseries, Cinemibus, onto Vimeo. This is largely because the YouTube content ID system is more trouble than it is worth, and I would just as soon do without the hassle. I have reposted my first episode of the series on that platform and embedded it above. All episodes of Cinemibus from here on out will be hosted on Vimeo, and I would like to preview those episodes, as well as the first episode of a new series, that are coming up this month!

On Thursday, April 9th, the second episode of Cinemibus will be posted. This one focuses on Iron Man 3 and focuses on the theme of superficiality. And I promise it is nowhere near as boring as I have just made that sound.

On Thursday, April 16th, I will be starting The Discerning Lyricist webseries, with a first episode discussing the awesomeness that is the musical Chess.

On Thursday, April 23rd, Cinemibus will be celebrating the impending arrival of a new Avengers movie with a look back at the old Avengers movie. This first part will be an in-depth look at the storytelling challenges the movie faced and what it did to overcome those challenges.

On Thursday, April 30th, I will release part 2 of the Avengers retrospective, this one focusing on the narrative problems that afflicted the first Avengers movie and how the sequel might improve on those elements.

Hope to see you there!

Small Thoughts On The Collateral Damage of Superheroism

Returning to the subject of the conflicts examined in superhero flicks, there has been a fair amount of attention given to the insane levels of collateral damage inflicted by these battles. In The Avengers, for example, there’s a shot where we see a skyscraper begin to collapse and we never see nor hear of it again. That building collapse alone must have killed hundreds; the battle as a whole may have killed millions. Compare this to, say, Spider-Man 2 or even The Dark Knight, where there are definitely casualties, but each one is given agonizing attention and are relevant to the emotional or thematic drive of the film.

I realize this is largely just due to the inevitable scaling-up of the action sequences. A big climax requires big stakes, and establishing big stakes requires one hell of a lot of destruction. Nevertheless, what all of this serves to underline is that the concept of superheroes is inherently fascistic. That is, the idea of a breed of people who have extraordinary abilities thanks to an accident of birth is fascistic. Quite possibly unavoidable, since we already have some people born smarter or better-looking than others, but then parlaying those powers into unrestrained authority over those not fortunate enough to have been born with superpowers doesn’t really help the case for superheroes.

The Talking Picture, Ep. 5 - Defeat, Deferred

On Story Climaxes

I was thinking about the Doctor Who Fiftieth Anniversary Special and how it manages to have a double climax. First, there is an emotional climax that resolves the story with the form-changing aliens which not only brings ten and eleven together but gives the War Doctor his sad determination to go on with his course of action, concluding with the two younger doctors resolving to do this thing that they know is abominable together so that no one of them would have to carry the burden alone. Only after that do we get the action climax which gives another emotional hit.

This got me thinking about other double climaxes, and the one that comes to mind most easily is Raiders of the Lost Ark. Indy has hit what we think is his lowest ebb when he and Marion are locked in the tomb with snakes by Beloq. This is his katabasis, but he rises like all good heroes and engages in a thrilling chase with the Nazis, at the end of which he gets the Ark. The movie could so easily have ended here. But it seems likely that the filmmakers thought they should give the audience more for their money, and so we get an even better climax, indeed the climax to end all climaxes. After all, no earthly climax can beat the wrath of God in terms of grandeur. The final climax, of course, is the Ark ceremony in which the hubris of the Nazis leads to the wrath of God horribly destroying them in a localized but vicious cataclysm.

But I do wonder which order is ideal in terms of multi-climaxes. Obviously, the two have to be different. The difference in Raiders is that the first climax is about what Indy does, demonstrating that he has done all a human can to recover the ark. The second climax humbles both the hero and the villains, showing that they are meddling with forces so much more massive than them that it is genuinely scarier than any number of cobras.

I do not know the answer to my own question of how to arrange double climaxes correctly. However, one of the things I was not all that wild about in The Avengers is that everyone but Tony Stark and Bruce Banner had finished their arcs by the time the actual battle began. The arcs of Widow, Hawkeye, Thor, Maria Hill, Nick Fury, and Cap had all finished, which meant that if you were following them and their struggles then the movie was over for you as soon as the first climax - the battle aboard the Helicarrier - was finished.

Though this does not tell us what we should do, it does constitute a nice little instruction on what not to do. Do not resolve the emotional arcs of your characters before the action climax, because then the action will seem hollow and token. It may well be hollow and token, but you must at least maintain the illusion.